Tech scientists hold nothing back in battling effects of Gulf spill

Ron Kendall was breathing in the wetland beauty of the Laguna Madre on the Texas Gulf Coast a few weeks ago when the enormity of the far-distant disaster first gripped him.

"This huge area is all at risk now," he remembers thinking. "Millions of birds. Critical fisheries. It's an environmental treasure on the Texas coast. That could be over by the time this thing is done."

And yet that thing, the oil, kept billowing out of the ruptured deep-sea well until long after Kendall, a renowned wildlife toxicologist, left that beach.

On Tuesday, weeks later, he had no doubt the sticky black poison will eventually lap into the lagoon, located about 80 miles north of Brownsville and 700 miles west of the blown well itself.

In fact, Kendall said Tuesday in his office at Texas Tech's Insitute of Environmental & Human Health, the well has already spewed enough oil to coat ecosystems all along the Gulf Coast.

As the institute's director, Kendall and a team of 25 other Tech scientists have been tasked with confronting one of the worst environmental disasters in American history.

No other team has the tools or the expertise that TIEHH has, he said. No other group has the decades of experience with wildlife toxicology. Kendall literally wrote the book on the topic.

Tech Chancellor Kent Hance called him soon after the well erupted and asked about Kendall's plan.

"I told him we would attack this with everything we had," Kendall said. "And we did."

The effort has since "consumed" Kendall and his team.

He had just landed back in Lubbock on Tuesday after another flight among his dozens to and from the coast since the disaster started in late April. He will go back next week.

He looked tired but spoke fast. Rocking in his chair. Explaining as much with his hands as his words. Scribbling dry-erase diagrams of how Hurricane Alex's wake pushed the oil from far ashore into Louisiana.

He stopped and shook his head at the thought of another one, of a Category-5 direct hit.

It was clear that for the past two months Kendall has been living in a cloud of dread, duty and flabbergast.

As one of the world's foremost experts, even Kendall can't wrap his mind around it.

The Exxon Valdez back in 1989 - he was there in Alaska helping to clean up the wrecked tanker's 11-million-gallon mess.

This current spill, he continued, is exponentially more tragic. An Exxon Valdez roughly every four or five days for months.

"It's unbelievable," Kendall said. "It's still unfolding. This is a catastrophe of enormous proportions. To me, this is the biggest environmental toxicology experiment we've ever conducted."

Engineers at the epicenter, meanwhile, were clinging to hope Tuesday as the temporary well cap continued to contain the gusher, but some wondered if it had actually made the leak worse.

According to The Associated Press, new seepage points have sprung up since the cap was placed on Thursday, rousing more questions of whether pressure from the cap was irritating the well beneath the sea floor.

But retired Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, the man spearheading Washington's response to the disaster, said Monday the amount of oil leaking was so far inconsequential, according to the AP.

The tentative success with the cap came as BP, the oil company responsible for response efforts, hopes to finish drilling relief wells - the only sure-fire fix - sometime next week.

But back in Lubbock, Kendall knows a permanent plug will only signal the end of the beginning. That's when crews will turn their full attention to the Leviathan cleanup effort.

The AP reported as many as 184 million gallons of crude had leaked as of Tuesday, though Kendall said it was probably closer to 200 million gallons.

"It's so thick. It's like chocolate mousse," he said, referring to just the fraction on the surface, using his hands to demonstrate its weight. "You can't even pick it up."

He again compared it to the Exxon Valdez's 11 million gallons that washed ashore along 1,000 miles of pristine Alaska coast.

Yet 20 times as much oil from this one has only shown up on 600 miles of coastline?

It's the plumes, Kendall said. The oil is suspended in mammoth globs below the surface, out of the reach of the best natural dispersant - the sun. The temperatures at those depths are basically preserving the giant globs "like a giant refrigerator."

"I think (the plumes are) the beast that we're going to have to deal with in the future," he said, especially once more hurricanes and tropical storms stir them.

And that's not counting the chemical dispersant BP had poured into the Gulf's waters to break up the oil.

His team spent weeks pleading with reluctant officials for a chemical breakdown of the dispersant. They finally received it recently after NPR broadcast the story.

The dispersant, Kendall said, could prove more harmful than the oil itself, and scientists at TIEHH are working around the clock to understand what happens when the two are mixed.

He fears it will make a toxic cocktail, but can't say for sure yet.

The carcasses have certainly piled up, though tests have yet to pinpoint oil as the sole culprit.

"It's not that we just have to count dead bodies," he said. "It's to go have long-term effects."

When the turtles ingest the oil, Kendall said, it ravages their throats and stomachs, causing ulcers. Then it destroys their livers along with their immune and nervous systems.

Kendall navigated the labyrinthine halls of the institute and opened locked laboratory after locked laboratory, where a small army of biologists, chemists and students worked the oil's impact from every conceivable angle.

Some mapped the chemical composition of samples gathered at the coast while others searched for DNA mutations the oil may have caused.

Other labs are lined with aquariums that span the food chain. From amphibians and fiddler crabs up to bird eggs and dolphin tissue.

"I'd venture to say we have more science going on right now than anywhere else in the country in this arena," he noted. "We hit this hard."

Going back to the Laguna Madre, Kendall said, the magnitude of the disaster hit him first.

But then another fact occurred to him - the human impact hung on the shoulders of the thousands of helpless fishermen.

"The economic envelope and environmental protection must go hand in hand," he said. "Think about the cotton crop disappearing, just like that. This is such a huge issue for our nation. This is horrible, and we need to get this right before we move forward."

(The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

To comment on this story:

matthew.mcgowan@lubbockonline.com • 766-8724

james.ricketts@lubbockonline.com • 766-8706

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